The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus AUReview

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Heath Ledger's final role - but hardly his finest.

By Patrick Kolan

In a career with some high-profile successes, it's a shame that director Terry Gilliam may be better known these days for his noble failures. 'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus' is the latest of these; a baffling fantasy that suffers greatly from the death of principle actor Heath Ledger and the subsequent scene-shattering rewrites. Gilliam has a grand vision and ambition – but the result is so broad and fractured that it ends up saying almost nothing, lacking focus, structure and impact.

Much of Parnassus' downfall can be directly attributed to the tragic death of Australian actor, Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight), who had yet to complete a significant portion of the film's more outlandish 'imaginarium' scenes. As a result, the narrative was clearly affected, requiring rewrites and a reshoot – ones that ultimately unhinge the story completely.

The titular character, Doctor Parnassus (Gilliam-regular Christopher Plummer), is an ancient and wizened figure of some apparent significance to an unusual eastern religious movement. When he makes a deal with the devil (played by an always watchable Tom Waits) for eternal life, he eventually realises he must make good on his end of the negotiation: by surrendering his daughter on her 16th birthday.

A thousand years later, we join him as his small-time performing troupe tempts disinterested locals with the chance to enter the fantastical realm of their own imagination – a life-altering event that pits participants against the light and dark elements of their personalities.

Gilliam leaves his almost-trademark visual stamp on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Spectacular, strange and inconsistent.

It's inside this John Malkovichian portal into their imaginations that Ledger's character, 'Tony', is transformed. Deft integration of stand-in actors –high-profile male leads Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell – serve to fill the acting void left by the deceased star. In reality, while the performances do ape Ledger's somewhat disinterested smarm, it's also quite distracting and, eventually, it leads to a turn of events so out-of-left-field for Ledger's character that it really does spoil the film. You will balk.

At times, Parnassus borders on a kind of experimental genius with its art direction; in a lot of ways, the film shares a similarly uneven and ambling structure with Richard Kelly's equally ponderous 'Southland Tales' – both films guilty of getting lost in a mess of poor plotting and narrative jumps.

If there's a single point of difference that Parnassus holds above most other films this year, it's within the visual style. Parnassus is so dense with symbolism and philosophy that it's easy to imagine Gilliam toiling away with set designers to dress each scene with as much Freudian metaphor and Dali-esque, dream-like iconography as possible. The film's theatrical structure – literally opening with a stilted stage performance – opens the door for Gilliam to flex arguably his greatest strength as a director – an eye for the eccentric, extending to the contraptions, costumes and make-up effects.

The surreality that marks many of Gilliam's past films is on show in full-force – to mixed success. The carnival sideshow atmosphere, complete with Gilliam's trademark obsession with little people and Botticelli's Venus continues – but the overreliance on CG effects work clashes badly at times with his artistic intent. Unfinished effects sequences, designed to show the artifice of the other dimensions – masking tape Xs on black soundstage walls still in view, for instance – point towards a tightened budget as much as artistic intent. Still, for fans of Gilliam's Monty Python roots, the unerringly strange design ethic harkens back to the 60s-era TV series, spouting colours, shapes and absurdities in all directions like a fountain of insanity.

You could be forgiven for thinking Ledger's mind was elsewhere during his final performance.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking thing about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is that the original plot might well have worked convincingly had Ledger not passed away. As his swansong performance, it's almost fitting that his performance feels somewhat flat; he doesn't bring a lot to the character, the film's resolution in turn does nothing with him. Fair deal.

The support cast do a solid job with making the eccentric settings and relationships believable – and the script is mostly intelligent (barring some of the additional post-Ledger sequences); Andrew Garfield's 'Anton' is the most affecting – but the value of his inclusion in the plot is similarly negated by the end. Even the good Doc Parnassus, played endearingly by Plummer, is denied a confrontation or sense of resolution. There's no pay off for the build-up.

All we're left with, after 122 minutes, is this incredible, unshakable sense that we've just witnessed a spectacular disaster – truly a 'noble failure' by the definition of the term. There are so many disparate elements at play, but it never comes together properly. In this way, Doctor Parnassus parallels Terry Gilliam and his most recent work: many complex ideas, grand intentions and miserable luck leading him down a path to nowhere, forcing him to start over with nothing one more time.